Having unleashed all that pent up capital in the American dream of home equity, skimmed it, and tag-teamed it, leaving you underwater and broke, Obama's pals in the financial, insurance and real estate sectors from Wall Street are starting to swoop in and gobble up your broken dreams.
Stephen Gandel reports for Fortune, here:
In the past six months or so, a number of investment firms, hedge funds, private equity partnerships and real estate investors have turned into voracious buyers of single-family homes. And not just any homes, but foreclosures. Investment banks, who also want in on the action, are lining up financing options to keep the purchases going.
Take for instance private equity mega-firm Blackstone Group (BX). ... Blackstone now owns 2,000 single-family homes. At $300 million, that might be small compared to Blackstone's overall real estate portfolio of about $50 billion. But it's one of the biggest piles of homes ever intentionally put together (banks and Fannie and Freddie are sitting on many more foreclosed homes, but that's a different story) by an institutional investor, and it's likely not the largest portfolio out there these days. ...
[L]andlords have always tended to be mom-and-pop outfits often not owning more than a few dozen units confined to one area. Large Real Estate Investment Trusts and private equity funds generally focused on apartment buildings and commercial real estate, like malls and office buildings. That appears to be changing.
Robert Fitch tried to tell everyone that this is what was coming under Obama, because it's what Obama helped make happen on the near south side of Chicago's Loop as a state senator. Obama helped throw out all the poor black people there, nearly 50,000 of them, so his friends could buy up the land, develop it, and make lots of money off it. They ended up helping finance him to the US Senate and The White House.
